Slave to Fashion

by Rebecca Campbell

  It came without ice or lemon but was still an improvement.

  Blissfully, the music stopped, followed by a final ragged round of applause. A fat man in a sweat-drenched pink T-shirt appeared and sat at the table.

  “Liam, how’s about helpin’ out wit’ a tune after we’ve had a point. Ah, I see ye’ve a lady wit’ yer. Chance fer yer to show her what yer can do wit’ yer throat.”

  “I’ll maybe see, Pat. But I don’t want to leave her alone here with all these wild beasts and animals.”

  “Oh, go on. I’d like it. Where’s the loo?”

  The ladies, when I got there, almost sobered me, it was so rank. It looked and smelled as though it had never been cleaned. One lavatory was choked with paper and sanitary towels and worse. The other had no seat. There was a Durex machine next to the filthy sink. Someone had written on it in black felt-tip: “For a refund, insert baby.” I thought that was quite funny.

  When I came back, Pat was sitting alone at the table, which filled me, as you can imagine, with joy. I looked around and saw Liam across the room, engaged in some kind of transaction with Frankenstein’s monster, who’d managed to trade his bolt for a fiberglass toupee.

  “Liam’ll just be a minute,” said Pat, sounding no more comfortable than I felt. He sat with one hand on top of his closely cropped head. His eyes feverishly searched the floor for a conversational gambit somebody might have dropped there. Inspiration dawned.

  “D’yer know deaf people?” he asked, his voice modulating curiously, as if he were coming through on a badly tuned shortwave radio.

  “I know of them,” I responded.

  “Ah!” he said, unsure of what to make of my reply. He built up his courage again.

  “I don’t think they’re really deaf at all,” he said positively, tapping the sticky tabletop with his finger.

  “Not deaf?” I said, praying that Liam would hurry back.

  “I mean,” he went on, his voice rising to something just a notch or two below a bellow, “how would you know? How would you really know? All you have to do is say ‘Pardon?’ when someone speaks to yez and yev convinced them yer a deaf man. And then it’s easy street for the rest of yer life.”

  Liam came back to rescue us both.

  “Okay, Pat, I’ll join you. As long as Marty has a scratch at his fiddle.”

  “Who was that scary man you were talking to?” I asked.

  “Just big Jonah. Scary’s right.”

  “Why, what does he do?”

  “He scares people.”

  “You mean protection?” I said, rather proud of the terminology.

  “Oh yes. And debt collecting. He’s famous for his catchphrase. You see, he’s something of a philosopher, and when he has to work, he first says to the guy ‘Are ye familiar with the works of Friedrich Nietzsche?’”—this basso profundo, in what I took to be a Glasgow accent—“And then he takes out his hammer. Time for a tune. Come on through, Katie.”

  The next room was almost as big as the main bar. People had crammed in to see the band, and there were no seats left. Liam found me a good place and then climbed up to join three other people on a little stage in the corner. Pat abandoned his keyboard and slung on a huge great piano accordion. A wiry old fellow with a face like a collapsed lung stood poised with a fiddle, and another with colossal sideburns, perhaps just a whisker short of a muttonchop, had a banjo. Liam picked up a guitar.

  “Hello, London,” he said rock star fashion, and winked at me through the crowd. “You’ll of heard this before about a million times. But tonight I’m singing it with a bit more feeling than usual.” The crowd shouted and laughed. Had they heard the patter before, as well as the song?

  If it was familiar, even clichéd, to the exiled Irish of Kilburn and Cricklewood, the song Liam sang was entirely new to me. The music I was used to was the sound track to a thousand clothes shops, a muted form of whatever was happening in the club scene. Music to pose by. Music to fill the spaces in between thought. This was something very different. It had a yearning and a sadness, and it squeezed me in its big rough hands.

  O Peggy Gordon, you are my darling,

  Come sit you down upon my knee,

  And tell to me the very reason

  Why I am slighted so by thee.

  Liam’s was not a beautiful voice, nor for that matter a powerful one. But it inhabited the music perfectly, breathing sincerity and pain.

  I’m so in love, I can’t deny it,

  My heart lies smothered in my breast;

  It’s not for you to let the world know it,

  A troubled mind can know no rest.

  As he sang he kept his eyes on me. He was so clearly singing to one particular person that people in the crowd started to look round.

  I did put my head to a cask of brandy,

  It was my fancy I do declare;

  For when I’m drinking I’m always thinking

  Of when Peggy Gordon was here.

  The banjo man had produced a pennywhistle from somewhere, and its delicate notes dipped and skipped around the words like a girl-child playing among the feet of adults.

  I wish I was away in Inglo,

  Far across the briny sea,

  Sailing o’er the deepest ocean,

  Where womankind never bother me.

  I wish I was in some lonely valley,

  Where womankind could not be found,

  And the pretty small birds would change their voices,

  And every moment a different sound.

  As soon as Liam began to reprieve the first verse, I knew something genuinely awful was going to happen. It was an extraordinarily, transparently naff thing to do, but it didn’t stop him. Nor did it prevent the thrill I felt creeping up my spine to the back of my neck, or the warm feeling in my pelvis.

  O Katie Castle, you are my darling,

  Come sit you down upon my knee,

  And tell to me the very reason

  Why I am slighted so by thee.

  The crowd whooped and cheered, and Liam climbed down, to have his back slapped and his hair ruffled by old-timers in strange hats and middle-aged women in the terminal stage of sexual excitation. He fought his way over to me.

  “I’m sorry about that changing-the-name thing, Katie. It must have seemed like an awfully daft thing to do. Ye’d have thought I’d have picked up a bit of cool from all my years of carting stuff around for the likes of you.”

  “You know what?” I said. “I liked it. I think it’s time I bought a drink.”

  And then . . . well, you know how it is. I reached that stage of being drunk when you love the world and when that love for the world finds a focus in the person you happen to be with. We slid together on the torn leatherette of the bench, but I don’t think we touched at all, which added greatly to the intensity of the experience.

  I knew I was on good form. Liam was no bimbo, and in between the flirting and silly stuff, we talked about serious things: Northern Ireland, of course, but also the nature of identity and being a stranger in another culture. I even produced some of the Deconstruction Malheurbe stuff, about signs, which rather bemused Liam.

  The point came, as it was bound to do, when Liam made his move. I was expecting an extended meander around the subject, but when it came it was thrillingly direct.

  “I’ve borrowed a key for a place near here. A place we can go to.”

  “I can’t stay the night.”

  “I understand. Shall we go?”

  As we made our way to the door, an old man I recognized as the fiddle player staggered toward us. He put an arm around our shoulders, which, given his diminutive stature, took some stretching on his part and stooping on ours. Clumps of wiry white hair were unevenly distributed about his face and head. He seemed to be toothless.

  “Liam, now, Liam . . .” he said, swaying slightly. A blast of whiskey breath hit me, damp and deathly.

  “Ah, Marty darlin’, that was a great clatter on the fiddle you gave us tonight,” said Liam, tryin
g to work himself free from the old man’s surprisingly firm grip.

  Marty ignored his compliment and fixed him with a bleary but steady gaze.

  “The child,” he said, looking to me, coughing with emotion, “ah, the child. You’ll not blackguard the child? Liam, you’ll not blackguard the child?” He coughed again, and I felt a spray of TB spores hit my face. Nauseated, I yanked myself away and ran gasping into the street. Liam followed a moment later.

  “Sorry about that, Katie. Poor auld Marty’s not the man he was. He gets notions; he has flights of fancy.”

  “It’s all right. I haven’t been called a child for a year or two. And I don’t think I’ve heard blackguard used as a verb before. In fact, I don’t think I’ve heard it used as an anything before. Anyway, will you?”

  “Will I what?”

  “Blackguard me, silly.”

  He smiled one of his specials and, for the first time, put his arm around me. He led me off the High Road, and we were soon lost in the side-street labyrinth of once stolidly bourgeois, now shabby and decrepit, redbrick houses.

  Now, you probably think that I was acting like a slut, drinking in a dive with a man I hardly knew and then just going off with him like that. And of course, you’d be right. But it was, as I’ve said, my last chance, my last bit of nonsense, the final fling. And who would deny a girl her final fling?

  We arrived. It was a house like all the others. A broken-backed path of checkered tiles led up to a door of flaky green. Pushing through the high tide of unopened junk mail, we found ourselves in a hallway so narrow that you felt the need to turn sideways. The scum-colored carpet was pockmarked with cigarette burns. We carefully navigated the dismembered corpse of a bike and what looked suspiciously like a whorl of cat poo. There was a smell of old damp cardboard. I suddenly felt a lot less drunk.

  “What a dump.”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry about this, Katie. If I’d known what it was like, I’d never have brought you here.”

  We squeezed up the stairs, where carpet gave way to blistered lino. Two flights later Liam was fitting a key warily into a lock. I expected something hideous, and I was relieved that it was only quite bad. Three rooms: a living room/kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom. It seemed to be clean, if spartan. There was a mattress with a black duvet on the floor in the bedroom. The walls were covered in an almost pretty wallpaper patterned with cherries and blackberries and other fruits of the forest; but whoever had decorated had not known to match up the pattern between rolls, which gave a very strange, genetic engineering effect, where cherries grew out of elderberries, or red currants, or thin air.

  I flopped down on the duvet, trying not to think about who or what might have shared it in the recent past.

  “Would you like a coffee?” said Liam.

  “Yes, if you can find any.”

  I looked at my watch for the first time that evening. It was only ten o’clock. So much seemed to have happened in just a couple of hours. I’d had my adventure, I thought. I’d explored a world I never knew existed, and I could now slip safely back into my own. It would make (suitably sanitized and censored) an amusing dinner party story. I might even tell Milo the whole thing. He’d love the “don’t blackguard the child” bit. I was giggling at this when Liam came in with the coffee.

  “There’s no milk.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Is there a phone? I’d like to call a taxi.”

  “Sure, I’ll call you one after the coffee. I know a number.”

  He sat next to me on the mattress. I put my head on his shoulder. He circled me with his arm and gently kissed the top of my head. I slid back and brought my lips up to meet his. As with all first kisses, there was a moment or two of adjustment, as a fact-finding mission is sent to establish the precise whereabouts of lips, teeth, and tongue.

  The beauty of the kiss, the reason for its allure, for its strangeness, is that it is at the same time the most innocent and the filthiest form of human contact: the first thing a mother does to her baby, the one thing a prostitute will never do. No subsequent erotic experience ever matches the intensity of the first kiss, so perfect because it sketches for you vast horizons, limitless spaces, endless possibilities. Whatever failures and flops follow, the kiss is never held responsible. The kiss never promises satisfaction, so it can never disappoint.

  But neither, especially when a man and a woman are alone in a bedroom for the first time, is a kiss ever just a kiss. My top came away in his hands. And then I was naked. He broke off the kiss just long enough to breathe, “Katie, you are so beautiful, so perfect.”

  I put my arms around the knotted muscles of his shoulders and kissed his neck and face.

  But then from somewhere deep inside a voice spoke, and it said, No. It wasn’t a rational thing, it wasn’t that I thought I was going to get caught and exposed. And it certainly wasn’t a moral voice. It was just some primeval instinct thingy, a warning, the voice that told the ape-man that a saber-toothed tiger was just outside the circle of light cast by the campfire.

  “Look, Liam, I’m sorry, I just can’t go on with this. I’ve messed you about. I’m an idiot. You’re a lovely man, but I really can’t do it.”

  “Ah, Katie darlin’, that’s all right,” he said tenderly. “I understand. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have bothered you. I really am an auld bollix.”

  Then, looking down, he said half-smilingly, half in genuine frustration, “But what the fuck am I supposed to do with this damn thing.”

  I followed his eye. And there it was. The most colossal erection I had ever seen. I’m sorry, I don’t want to be crude, but it was simply one of the wonders of the world. The combination of that stupendous, glistening willy and his helpless, boyish frustration, was irresistible. I lost myself in giggles, and he joined in. I opened my arms.

  “Poor boy,” I said as he came to me, “you’d better put it here.”

  And so we spent an hour there in that room with its mattress on the floor, and the black duvet, and the misaligned pattern. We did everything. Yes, even that.

  The minicab driver was from the Ivory Coast. He’d been a political prisoner. He was an accountant by trade. I listened to him talking sweetly about his family, and sadly about having to drive for a living (he was in truth a terrible driver, staying, as far as I could make out, in third gear all the way), rather than using his qualifications. I gave him a big tip. On impulse I asked him, as I handed him the money, if he’d driven girls from that address before.

  “Oh yes, miss, many times,” he replied.

  CHAPTER 8

  A Short Chapter,

  Punctuated by a Colon

  I came in as quietly as I could, hoping Ludo would have gone to bed, but he was in his study, marking books.

  “Hi, babe,” he called. “Have a good time with the girls?”

  “Nothing special. I stink of smoke. I’m just going to dive in the shower.”

  After the shower I slipped between my clean white sheets and thanked the Lord for Primrose Hill. The hour had been a good hour, but now it was gone forever, and I was happy.

  Ludo soon came to bed. He curled around me from behind in the familiar way, cupping my breast in his hand. He nuzzled my ear and began to roll down my knickers. And the astonishing thing is that I was actually quite turned on. But not even I was brazen enough to do it with two different men in the same evening. And besides, I was a bit . . . sore. I felt a wave of affection for my boy and put him off as gently as I could.

  When I opened my eyes the next morning, I felt a great surge of energy. There was no sign of sun through the heavy October clouds, but I felt as if I’d just thrown back the curtains on a new world. I crept out of bed, which was hard because I wanted to leap, and went to make coffee. I brought it in to Ludo on a tray with some cornflakes and the paper and kissed him awake. His hair was doing its usual mad morning corkscrew thing, but I thought he looked lovely.

  I decided to forgive him for the poem.

  “Full of beans this mor
ning,” he said drowsily. “Haven’t got a hangover?”

  It was funny, I really ought to have had—more than a glass of wine usually leaves me putrid the next day. But then I suppose I sort of did have a hangover. I’ve been told that when you’re on morphine you are still vaguely aware of the fact that you’re in pain, but you just don’t mind. That’s how I felt.

  “Just glad to be alive,” I said in a Sunday-school way.

  My good mood continued all the way in to work and beyond. Even the Northern Line was having one of its rare Dr.-Jekyll-rather-than-Mr.-Hyde days. In place of the usual mix of ashen-faced, jowly drones and maniacal starers, the carriage seemed to be filled with color and life and excitement, as if the Rio carnival had taken to commuting in to London.

  That morning was the most fertile I’d ever had. I did something dramatic in all the different bits of my job: design, production, PR, selling. I even managed to change the cartridge in the printer, which usually entails getting in a specialist, while six of us girlies stand around gasping at the cleverness of boys, as if he’d just brought the gift of fire to our previously dark and cold Neanderthal cave.

  Penny swanned in at eleven-thirty with an amusing tale about being joined in the Jacuzzi at her health club by “a Middle Eastern gentleman” who proceeded to remove his trunks.

  “He just sat back with his arms and legs open, and his do-dah waving about in the current, like a conger eel. I didn’t know what to do with my face.”

  Mandy, who was up from the studio to complain about the new temporary sample machinist (who she claimed was “breathing funny on purpose to get on my nerves”), chipped in with a similar story, which seemed to be set in some Caribbean all-inclusive resort.

  “And you know what I did,” she said, her face puckered in contempt, “when he slid round to my bit? I peed in the water, that’s what I did, and got out. Let them stew in your juice, is what I say.”

  “But doesn’t the water turn red?” said Penny, intrigued.